By Katie Kerwin McCrimmon and Diane Carman
Colorado leaders have failed to tackle gun fatalities as a public health threat and gun deaths in Colorado and nine other states now exceed automobile fatalities, according to data from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the Violence Policy Center.
Coloradans are reeling from the Aurora theater massacre, the third mass shooting here since 1999 when Columbine shattered the country’s psyche. Yet Colorado’s governor told a national television audience on Sunday that he thought there was little that could have been done to prevent the recent killings, and conspicuously absent from the state’s 10 winnable public health battles is any mention of gun deaths.
Delbert Elliott
“Colorado could do something to deter gun violence,” said Delbert Elliott, director for the Center for the Study and Prevention of Violence at the University of Colorado in Boulder. “The tragedy in Aurora has highlighted for some people that we don’t ban assault rifles. We don’t have controls on ammunition purchases.”
Colorado health leaders should look at California as a model, says gun opponent, Kristen Rand, legislative director for the Violence Policy Center, a gun violence prevention center based in Washington, D.C.
“California is where this whole history of horrific mass shootings started. Now, apparently, Colorado is the capital with Columbine and the theater shooting. Colorado needs to move aggressively to implement a real assault weapons ban and restrictions on high capacity magazines,” she said.
“It’s certainly going to happen again until people stand up and say we’ve had enough bloodshed.” — Kristen Rand, Violence Policy Center, Washington, D.C
“It’s certainly going to happen again until people stand up and say we’ve had enough bloodshed,” Rand said. “Gov. Hickenlooper should sit down and look through some gun catalogs and Internet sites and see what is being marketed and see what people in Colorado are buying. If he did, he’d be frightened. This is not going to end with this shooting.”
James Holmes, the neuroscience student accused of killing 12 and injuring 58 in Aurora last week, legally purchased assault weapons and more than 6,000 rounds of ammunition over the Internet. According to police, he had those packages delivered undetected to his home and school. Had Holmes military-style weapon not jammed, police have said he could have mowed down scores more people who were trapped in the dark theater.
Colorado officials from the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives refused to comment on Holmes’ recent gun and ammunition purchases citing a gag order as prosecutors make their case against Holmes. Colorado representatives of the National Rifle Association and Dudley Brown of the Rocky Mountain Gun Owners did not return calls from www.HealthPolicySolutions.
Public health prevention efforts have driven automobile deaths down in Colorado and across the U.S. while gun deaths have increased.
‘Weakest gun control laws of developed countries’
Public health experts say the markedly different trends in auto and gun deaths are telling. In one case, experts in government and industry have worked together to make driving much safer, with sweeping efforts to mandate seat belts, combat drunk driving and limit teens driving with other teens. In Colorado, for example, safety measures have cut the rate of auto deaths in half since 1995.
10 states where gun deaths outpace auto fatalities
- Alaska
- Arizona
- Colorado
- Indiana
- Michigan
- Nevada
- Oregon
- Utah
- Virginia
- Washington
Source: Violence Policy Center
But, when it comes to deaths from firearms, there has been no concerted effort to limit gun purchases or even to address violence prevention, safe guns storage or gun safety and education measures that all sides support. As a result, rates of deaths by firearms continue to climb.
David Hemenway
“We have by far the weakest gun control laws of any developed country,” said David Hemenway, professor of health policy at the Harvard School of Public Health who has made the public health issue of guns a focus of his research throughout his career.
Unlike the broad-based approach to reducing traffic fatalities, “we have almost no money for research,” Hemenway said. “The CDC is afraid to even say the word ‘guns.’ ”
In Colorado, gun deaths have been climbing, rising from about 440 in 2000 to about 550 in 2010, according to data from the Colorado Health Information Dataset. Meanwhile auto deaths are declining, down from 714 in 2000 to about 480 in 2010, even as Colorado’s population grew from about 4.3 million to just over 5 million during that decade.
Colorado has relatively low homicide rates compared to the rest of the country, but has one of the highest suicide rates in the U.S. More than half of the men who commit suicide use a gun, while one-third of women kill themselves with a gun.
“We have by far the weakest gun control laws of any developed country…“The CDC is afraid to even say the word ‘guns.’ ” — David Hemenway, professor of health policy, Harvard School of Public Health
Prevention is the cornerstone of winning any public health battle, Hemenway said.
“You clearly try to think about prevention instead of just waiting for a crime to happen and prosecuting it,” he said. “The public health effort tries to go as far upstream as possible and think of all the ways to prevent serious problems from happening.”
Scientists often use the motor vehicle analogy, he said. To reduce vehicular deaths, communities don’t just focus on drivers, but on the safety features of vehicles and highways, the availability of emergency medical care, education, law enforcement and other ways to reduce deaths and injuries.
“Nobody thinks drivers are any better than they were when I was growing up,” Hemenway said, but over the past 60 years, “we’ve reduced deaths per motor vehicle mile driven by 90 percent.”
In contrast, Americans are reticent to tackle gun deaths. But efforts elsewhere have been effective. Hemenway pointed to successful measures in Australia.
From 1979 through 1996, 13 mass shootings were reported across Australia. Since 1996, when stringent gun-control laws were implemented, including a mandatory buy-back of all semi-automatic firearms, no mass shootings have occurred.
“Civil libertarians in Australia think we’re crazy” to equate liberty with gun ownership, Hemenway said. “They say there’s no freedom if you’re afraid to go out on the street at night.”
While legislation to restrict access to guns is unlikely in the U.S., Hemenway said efforts to change social norms around guns could have some effect. He cited the highly effective designated driver campaign over the past several years.
“We want an 11th commandment for gun safety that says friends don’t let friends who are going through a rough spot have easy access to guns,” he said.
Hemenway said the movie theater mass shooting reveals just how difficult it is to identify deranged killers before they act.
“It doesn’t look like it ever will be very easy to figure out who’s going to do this,” he said. “The easiest way to prevent these incidents is to prevent people from having legal access to these incredibly lethal weapons, like they did in Australia.”
Gun proponents say weapons save lives
Proponents of gun rights say the fallacy of the public health argument is that guns can also save lives.
Dave Kopel, research director for the Independence Institute, associate political analyst for the Cato Institute and an adjunct professor of law at the University of Denver Law School, said he has been following the debate about the public health issues surrounding guns for 25 years.
Dave Kopel
“The public health thinking says that when you have gunshot injuries the cause is bullets hitting people,” he said. “But there are a couple of problems with that.”
One, he said, is that “guns work both ways.”
“In the wrong hands, guns are really dangerous and destructive, but in the right hands, guns are enhanced public safety.”
Kopel said the reason the “gun control issue is not that big a deal in the public debate is that through compromise and consensus we have decided to protect lawful use, especially defensive use.”
“In the wrong hands, guns are really dangerous and destructive, but in the right hands, guns are enhanced public safety.” — Dave Kopel, research director for the Independence Institute, associate political analyst for the Cato Institute and an adjunct professor of law at the University of Denver Law School.
“The public health analysis in my view is too one-sided. It looks only at the downside. It doesn’t look at the other side.”
Kopel said any analysis of the roles of guns in public health should be “holistic.”
Politicians don’t want to ‘go near’ guns
Yet, says John Straayer, a political analyst and professor at Colorado State University, the idea that guns make people safer has never proven true in mass killings. Theoretically people in the Aurora theater could have been armed.
“I don’t remember anybody firing back in any of these instances. It doesn’t happen.”
Straayer said the gun lobby has wielded its power successfully here and across the country.
The NRA is maybe the most powerful interest group in Colorado. The bills we’ve had in the legislature have loosened rather than tightening any kinds of restrictions on guns.”
While Straayer “absolutely” supports gun control measures himself, he thinks it’s unlikely that politicians here or elsewhere will forge ahead on the issue.
“They don’t want to go near it, even when you talk about issues like safety locks,” Straayer said.
The gun lobby has done a masterful job of convincing politicians that any conversation about safe storage of weapons or safety locks is a “slippery slope.”
“There’s not a real vested, organized, consistent and persistent constituency for it,” Straayer said.
So, support for controls tends to flare up after an incident like Columbine or the Aurora theater shooting, then attention fades and the public forgets.
Straayer thinks that’s because mass killings are so rare and people naturally assume they will never be the victim of such an event. They are much more invested in day-to-day issues like gas prices and unemployment rates.
While Hickenlooper has drawn some criticism for hedging on whether Colorado could have done anything to prevent the Aurora tragedy, Straayer said he “probably did the judicious thing.”
“He kept the focus on the victims and the victims’ families, caring about them and coming together,” Straayer said. “Using (Aurora) as a launching pad for legislation in that context wouldn’t have been well-received.”
Nonetheless, Straayer thinks the governor and public health leaders must take the opportunity in coming weeks to more closely analyze why Colorado has been the setting for yet another mass killing and how public policy could help prevent future mass shootings, along with much more common gang incidents, fights and domestic violence that leave well over one person a day dead in Colorado from guns.
Dr. Chris Urbina, executive director and chief medical officer of the Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment, declined to talk about gun safety as a public health issue. His spokesman also declined to respond to questions about why gun safety is not one of Colorado’s 10 winnable battles.
Straayer said elected officials and those in the public sector are reticent to lead.
“Leadership is all about getting the public to care about things. I think that’s a sadly-missing element in modern American politics. You run polls to see what people think and if there’s support there, you run with it because it pays off with votes.
Suicide and motor vehicles – death among the young
- Suicide is the leading cause of death among young people in Colorado ages 15 to 24.
- Motor vehicle crashes are the second leading cause of death among young Coloradans.
- For the first time, in 2010, there were more suicides among the young than fatal car crashes.
- Suicides in Colorado: 867 in 2010, down from record peak of 940 in 2009)
- Rank nationally: 6th highest in the U.S. Highest suicide rates are in Alaska, Montana, New Mexico, Wyoming, Nevada, then Colorado. Why? Click on our earlier coverage: Record suicide toll rocks Colorado. Could altitude be to blame?
Source: Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment, Office of Suicide Prevention
“
“That’s not leadership. That’s political careerism.”
To some extent, Straayer thinks the Aurora killings are a “sad coincidence.” But the summer of 2012 has been a heartbreaker.
“It’s been fires, fires, fires and tremendous destruction. We just get over that and the skies clear and now this happens. (President) Obama had a jump on a plane twice in a month to console us,” he said.
After Columbine, ‘nothing was done’
David Winkler of Thornton was a founding member of the gun-control advocacy group SAFE Colorado after the Columbine shootings. He now does public policy research.
“After the Columbine shootings, I got involved. I was a high school student at the time and hadn’t been very political before then.”
“I started driving to high schools and meeting people in parking lots, inviting them to get involved.”
Students from SAFE Colorado went to Washington, D.C., the summer after Columbine and met with members of Congress, President Clinton and Vice President Al Gore.
“At the federal level, nothing was done,” Winkler said. “In fact, some laws already on the books were allowed to expire.”
In Colorado, SAFE succeeded in getting an initiative on the ballot to close the gun-show background check loophole. Amendment 22 passed with support of 70 percent of the voters, one of the most popular initiatives in the state’s history, Winkler said.
“A lot of people blame gun owners and the NRA (National Rifle Association)” for the easy access to firearms in the United States. “But that’s misleading. The largest influence comes from the industry – gun and ammunition manufacturers, sellers and dealers. Their push is for more guns sold and more bullets in the magazines. They want almost no limits on that.”
“So much of what’s sad about this debate is that people are saying no one thing could have stopped it. But there are lots of things that might make the next crazy person not have access to so much firepower.”
Preventing violence in children
Ken Gordon, who was minority leader in the Colorado House in 1999, carried a bill calling for mandatory background checks for anyone purchasing firearms at gun shows. The measure died in the Appropriations Committee for lack of support.
Ken Gordon
“Most people of both parties are afraid they’ll lose elections based on this issue,” said Gordon.
While leaders were skittish about supporting most gun control measures in 1999, Gordon said “it’s worse now.”
“With so much money in politics, it selects for people who don’t have strong principles and are willing to cater to special interests.”
“The gun lobby makes a living by frightening law-abiding hunters into believing that liberals from Boulder and San Francisco and New York are going to take away their guns,” Gordon said, “when the point is to stop people from having assault weapons and 100-round clips because there’s absolutely no good reason for them to have them.”
Gordon now works with CleanSlateNow.org, an organization that mobilizes support for candidates who don’t accept money from special interest groups.
For Del Elliott, the key to prevention goes far beyond guns. His violence policy center supports programs proven to work with young children.
The problem now is that school leaders are so focused on boosting test results that many are not carving out the time to teach children about non-violence and bullying prevention.
Elliott is also a big believer in anonymous tip lines. He cites the work of Safe2Tell, a Colorado-based hotline that started after Columbine. Since 2004, tips to Safe2Tell have prevented 28 planned school attacks.
“Even in these mass shootings, someone almost always knows it’s about to happen. They know that plans are being made. We don’t know yet if that’s the case for the Aurora shooting,” Elliott said. “But, if any law enforcement person had known all of the things that we now know about Columbine, there would have been an intervention.
“We have to make much better efforts on prevention,” Elliott said. “If we can raise our children to believe that violence is not a solution to the difficulties that they face, if they never consider that as an option, then gun control ceases to be an issue.”
Leaders who throw up their hands and say, “There’s nothing we can do, it’s the 2nd Amendment,” are not leaders. They’re enablers, just as Dave Kopel and the “Tyranny Response Team” and other loony right wing groups are enablers of murder. The usual NRA-sponsored argument that a “brave citizen” with his own weapon enhances public safety, and might well have stopped the shooting in Aurora is sophistry, and William Saletan’s piece on Slate (http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/human_nature/2012/07/the_aurora_shooting_bulletproof_vests_swat_gear_and_body_armor_refute_the_nra_.html) demonstrates why.
At Columbine, the murderers were dressed in casual clothing, while the police had plenty of SWAT gear, and hid behind fire trucks. This time, the murderer was covered with body armor, and the brave citizen who tried to take him out with his own handgun in the smoke and confusion would simply have drawn attention to himself (or herself), and likely ended up as one more casualty. To suggest that the sensible way to respond to mass killings of this type is to arm the citizenry at large is insanity, and it ought to be labeled as such.
I own (and use) multiple firearms. The 2nd Amendment says what it says, but rational, thinking leaders – real leaders, with the public welfare and public safety in mind – should be able to devise and implement several means by which assault weapons are available only to those with a reasonable use for them (by which I mean the military, and only secondarily the police), and tightly–controlled access to them.
Except for killing people in sizable numbers, there’s nothing an assault rifle does in the NRA’s usual “hunting and recreation” context that can’t be done by a “regular” hunting rifle. Very few “real” hunters go after elk with an AR-15, nor do they do so with a high-capacity magazine. If it takes you 27 rounds to bring down that elk, you don’t belong in the mountains with a firearm during hunting season to begin with. Access to military-style weaponry ought to be limited to… the military.
Don’t look to Australia as the shining example. We’ve had an average of one driveby every other day for the whole of this year. Firearms in crime is climbing, and our laws have not changed. Criminals still get guns. In South Australia, recently, a lone gunman entered a café and started shooting. It just so happened there were 2 outlaw motorcycle gang members there, who were (illegally) carrying concealed firearms. They were committing no other crime at the time. They were able to return fire when the shooting started, and the shooter was injured, but escaped. No one else was hurt. So, the people in that café had criminals to thank for saving their lives…. because those that obeyed the law, were left defenceless. How is that right?
As for the Colorado shootings and comments by ‘the photoguy’. If I was in that theatre, and legally armed, yes I might draw attention to myself shooting at the gunman. At least they wouldnt be shooting at my family. Perhaps you think there’s some sort of bravery or moral high ground, in just letting yourself be shot, I dont know. I wouldnt shoot back because I want to be brave, or a hero. I’d shoot back because I dont want myself, my family, or others to die. It was illegal to be armed in that place. That failed. Its illegal to kill people – punishable by the death penalty – that didnt stop him. What kind of gun law do you think would work with such a person?
An AR-15 is not an Assault rifle. An assault rifle is capable of fully automatic, and/or burst fire. The very large majority of AR-15s are not made for either. It might surprise you that many people dont just hunt deer. Speaking from experience, as an Australian limited to only a bolt action hunting rifle (they recently heavily restricted pump action 7600 series and similar rifles too) if you’ve ever tried to take down a large mob of feral pigs with a bolt gun, particularly with a low cap mag, you’re not going to be too successful. Hunters dont just go for trophy kills.
But why is Australia the shining example? Why not New Zealand? they had a massacre about the same time as Australia. The did not implement as restrictive laws as Australia (you can still own an AR15 with a (shall issue) permit, you can own a semi-auto or pump action shotgun, or a semi-auto SKS with a fixed mag, without any permit. There’s no longarm registration. They have a simpler system of licensing.
Australian laws dont stop gun crime. Everyone knows it. The Colorado shooter would have still been able to obtain firearms capable of what he did, in Australia. he had no criminal record, no mental health history. He would’ve been licensed, been able to obtain his 40 calibre handguns (albeit Glock 35s), a lever action shotgun, and a pump action 7615 or a bolt gun with detachable mag that would have permitted him to kill just as many people.
You all talk about gun control… what about raving nutjob control. Why not look to mental health issues. This is supposed to be a health policy solutions website is it not?
Hmmm… ~9.5% of the article word count is pro-gun, and ~95% is anti-gun. Wonder why the authors bothered to ask Kopel for any comments at all – it wasn’t to write a balanced article, that’s for sure. When you have an agenda, and you are on the losing side in a public debate, you have to at least attempt to appear even-handed. Or you just drag your side down further.
In follow-up, let’s look at a rebuttal of the VPC’s (Josh Sugarman’s) data on auto vs gun deaths, from http://www.thetruthaboutguns.com/2012/05/bruce-krafft/comparing-car-and-gun-fatalities-is-misleading-and-irrelevant/
[EXERPT]“So what Josh really has in mind is to use safety regulations to “reduce the carnage.” But “safety regulations” would have no effect on suicide or homicide rates. So Josh must want to “reduce the carnage” from firearm accidents. A noble and worthy goal, I’m sure. What exactly are the accidental death and injury rates for firearms, as compared to cars?”
To describe the table in the link above, Gun Deaths/100k ranged from 0.18 to 0.28, while Car Deaths/100k ranged from 11.62 to 15.38 between 2000 and 2009. Gun Injuries/100k ranged from 4.62 to 8.21 and Car Injuries/100k ranged from 848.49 to 1183.93.
The VPC and anti-gun folks constantly try to manipulate data to make firearms look far worse in the public’s eyes than reality. Unfortunately, the media eagerly swallows such bogus analysis hook, line and sinker, presumably as the ends justify the means.
The article was written in July. So was my initial comment. I’ve gone back through what I wrote in light of the recent Newtown massacre, and see no reason to change any of the substance of what I wrote previously. The 2nd Amendment says what it says, and comes from a background of a society where only the military had firearms of any kind. I understand why it’s part of the Bill of Rights. This has never – ever – been a society where only the military has access to firearms, nor have I ever suggested that it be so. While I don’t expect to see it in my lifetime, at some point, I can only hope that the general public, tired of public bloodbaths, will finally insist that assault weapons and high-capacity magazines be banned – not just from possession, but also from manufacture.
I also continue to believe that “Avatar” doesn’t have a moral or intellectual leg to stand on. As is common with gun-worshippers, he falls back on a technical argument that the AR-15 is somehow not an assault weapon because it’s not fully automatic. In polite circles, we would call that argument “intellectually dishonest,” or perhaps more accurately, “sophistry.” In less polite circles, there are various other names…
Had the Aurora shooter, or the Newtown shooter, been limited to a hunting rifle with 3-round clips, brave Mr. Avatar would have had longer and more frequent opportunities to demonstrate his fantasy-based heroism, since the shooters would have had to stop and reload multiple times in order to inflict the same amount of carnage. Lacking that sort of limitation, and given the perversion of the NRA and the willful blindness of Mr. Avatar, we can expect to witness – hopefully at a safe distance – more of the same kinds of mass killings until some sad day when multiple legislators have family members killed or wounded by yet another deranged and heavily-armed shooter. At that point, perhaps politics and campaign dollars will cede ground to humanity and common sense.